The idea of the countless “virtual worlds” that the metaverse will contain is, as we saw in our last entry, an extrapolation of the idea of “video game worlds,” not necessarily regarding their playful nature—since the metaverse is expected to be a place for almost any kind of activity, not just leisure—but in the sense […]
One of the things the media present these days as one of the most important technological advances for the near future is what has come to be called the metaverse . The metaverse could be characterized by two fundamental properties. First, what is now offered to us through more or less large two-dimensional screens (ranging […]
In my past entry I commented on the problems that Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science contains regarding her analysis of idealization. Now I will look at the question of truth. My main argument is that neither the widespread use of blatant falsities in science, nor the existence of other goals different from […]
Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science is probably one of the most interesting and ambitious philosophy of science books of the last years. It offers a picture of scientific knowledge and of its production that elaborates on, and wisely amends, some of the best literature in the recent ‘pragmatist’ tradition of philosophy of […]
Modern physics suggests time may be an illusion. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously – with no special “now”. What’s the future to one observer, is the past to another. That means time doesn’t flow from past to future […]
I am these days reading the delightful (though at times quite demanding) Reviel Netz’s A New History of Greek Mathematics, and I have not resisted the temptation of sharing with you some of the many pearls it contains. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that it is not a mere ‘survey’ […]
I will close this series by commenting on the most conspicuous element of the contemporary debate about whether science points towards the existence of some kind of ‘cosmic purpose’: the possibility that the universe we observe is only a vanishingly small part of a mega-infinity of worlds – the multiverse, and more specifically, the inflationary […]
Many books have been published on the history of science. Each one provides a specific insight, and together they offer a fairly complete overview of the evolution of a substantial part of the intellectual heritage of mankind. The book I will review in these lines is, from that point of view, one more. One more […]
Deception is natural. All animals do it as a survival strategy; prey to avoid predators and predators to catch prey. Intraspecies deception, however, occurs mainly in the most intelligent species, for example among cephalopods, corvids and, of course, apes. Studies on the subject have found a direct relationship between the size of the neocortex and […]
The geologists of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) made a substantial decision on March 4, 2024 , by rejecting the proposal to formally acknowledge the beginning of the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch attributing humanity’s emergence as the primary force shaping the Earth’s strata. This proposal, led by the Anthropocene Working […]